


The Coalition Christmas Gala

by Ebhenah



Series: Klancemas 2018 [9]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Domestic klance, F/M, Family Feels, Fluff, Klance future family fic, M/M, Married Klance, Medical Devices, Sick Kid, Worried dads, living with genetic disease, non-fatal childhood heart attack, sick teen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 21:49:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17030628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ebhenah/pseuds/Ebhenah
Summary: Written for the Klancemas event by MonthlyKlance on tumblrKlancemas 2018"The Coalition Christmas Gala"Dec 16: Dance/Party(A future Klance-Family Fic)Cw: discussion of serious life-threatening genetic childhood illness, medical devices, treatments, and non-fatal childhood heart attack.





	The Coalition Christmas Gala

“Daaaad! Help me with this stupid…” Talia’s voice had started out ear splittingly loud but faded so much with each word that Keith honestly had no idea what he was being requested for. He did the quick courtesy knock that his daughter had drilled into his head when she was about eleven because ‘oh my gawwwwwwd! I could have been getting dressed!’ and opened the door.

She was getting dressed. 

Being tended to by her fathers during repeated hospitalizations, surgeries and recoveries had gotten rid of that particular stripe of self-consciousness pretty quickly. But, he still knocked. Hard habit to break. Besides, it was just basic courtesy.

Her dark hair was swept up into some kind of fancy bun… that wasn’t a bun. When he’d called it a bun earlier Talia, Juanita and Lance had all audibly gasped at how very wrong he was to think it was a bun. Whatever. Still looked like a fancy bun to him. The dress she was wearing for the party was hanging on the back of her mirror and she was in stocking feet with one of those slinky dresses you wear under dresses on- a slip, maybe? She didn’t get all dolled up often enough for him to have learned this stuff. “What did you need little star?”

“I’ve got a clog, or a kink in the line or something,” she grumbled, “and for me to check I’d have to get all undressed…”

“Okay. Alright,” he fought back panic, “hand me the interface.” She huffed and handed him the palm-sized device and he noticed that under the lipstick, her lips were blue, and so were her fingertips. He caught her hand, getting a better look, “how long have you been like this?”

“Not long, Dad, I promise,” she was calm, but that didn’t really reassure him. She’d been completely calm right before her first heart attack when she was twelve, too- despite the fact that her oxygen saturation had been plummeting and her heart racing and she couldn’t get enough air into her little body, she’d been eerily calm. “As soon as I noticed I was out of breath, I tried to fix it… and then I called you.”

He made a rumbling noise but didn’t push. She hated it when they treated her like she was sick. Even though she was ACTUALLY sick. He held the interface to the little sensor just under the skin of her left hand, by her thumb. Her oxygen levels were low. It wasn’t dangerous, yet, but they were dropping. More concerning was that as they dropped, her pulse increased. Her pacemaker kept it steady, but her heart wasn’t strong enough to handle too much strain. “Okay. We got this. Simple matter of getting you the supply your body is demanding, right?” He flashed a smile he hoped was reassuring and ran through the checklist in his head. 

First things first: check the tank. It was the easiest to fix and the most common problem. “Deep breath, sweetheart,” he said, waiting for her to get a lungful of air before popping the oxygen canister off of the tubing and replacing it with a fresh one. “Any better?”

She shook her head, sitting down and holding the interface in place. “O2 at 89, Dad,” she said softly.

“On it. Arms up!” She did as he asked and he traced the tubing that supplied her with the supplemental oxygen she needed because of the dangerously narrow trachea that 90% of kids with Sandacies Syndrome had. His fingers slid smoothly and quickly from the point where the narrow bio-plastic discreetly vanished between her ribs just below the bra line to where it fused with the tube that connected to the tank, and repeated the process on the other side. “No kinks, and I didn’t see a clog.”

“Dammit,” she hissed and he could hear her struggling to hold back tears.

“It’s alright, Talia. We’re not done with the check yet. It could still be something we don’t need help with.”

“Yeah. Okay… you’re right.” 

There was supposed to be a whole procedure for checking each individual oxygen line, but they’d figured out a bit of a hack a while ago. He upped the pressure on the oxygen just a little and then pinched off one tube. “Better?” he asked after a few seconds. She shook her head and he repeated the test on the other side. “How about now?”

“91 and climbing!”

“Awesome! Don’t tell Uncle Shiro about this. You know how he is about cutting corners.” He grabbed the maintenance gear and went about clearing the troublesome line and re-attaching it, returning the tank settings to her normal. Then he grabbed the interface and changed the function, “but even I won’t skip over the pacemaker check.”

“Dad, come on! It was just a line issue! The pacemaker is fine.”

“Nope- not risking you having another ‘incident’.” Three years, two months and eight days later, he still couldn’t bring himself to say the words ‘heart attack’ out loud. The little screen showed a swirling ‘in progress’ screen while it ran a diagnostic of the internal device that prevented her from having dangerous arrhythmias. After a moment, the whole screen flashed blue. “Alright. Good to go. Keep an eye on your oxygen levels tonight- we might need to replace that line.”

“I KNOW,” she said with a sigh and an eyeroll so hard he could hear it.

He helped her to her feet and studied her face for a moment. Her cheeks were looking rosier, and the blue tinge was gone from around her lips. “Are you SURE you feel up to this?”

“Dad! You guys PROMISED that I could go to the big formal Christmas party this year! I’ve been looking forward to this for months!” Her brown eyes flashed with anger, “and I know that Uncle Shiro is getting some kind of commendation, and my friend Rhysnaea is going to be there and I haven’t seen her since her parents got stationed on that underwater research facility on Mer… and I told Bailey that I was going to be there.” Her cheeks went from ‘rosie’ to ‘crimson’ on that last part.

“Bailey? Bailey GRIFFIN? That Bailey?”

She nodded, chewing her lip. James Griffin’s nephew. His fifteen year old daughter had a crush on James Griffin’s seventeen year old nephew. Lance was going to lose his mind. Keith sighed. “Fine… just… pay attention to how you are feeling, please?”

“I promise!” 

She looked so damn excited. “Anything else you need my help with?”

She glanced at the dress and he could see her debating. “No,” she said finally, “I’ve got it from here… besides, Papi will KILL you if you try to get out of wearing your dress uniform! You have to go get changed!” She dragged her eyes from the top of his head to his feet and back up, “and for all our sakes, PLEASE let Papi do… Something with your hair!” All of a sudden, she was on the move, turning him with a quick wrench of his shoulders and literally pushing him out the door. “PAPI!” She called, her expression impish, “Dad said he was going to let you do his hair tonight!”

“You are an evil child,” he muttered, “we should never have let Pidge babysit you…”

Lance appeared out of literally nowhere. The hallway had been empty. He’d blinked… and then his husband was standing right in front of him, looking too gorgeous for Keith’s sanity and sporting such a hopeful smile that he knew he wasn’t getting out of the house with his hair loose tonight. “No fancy buns,” he said, holding up one finger.

“Keith,” he sighed, “it is a braided pompadour chignon. That’s what Talia’s hairstyle is.”

“See? It doesn’t really matter what words you SAY, what I HEAR is ‘fancy bun’.”

Lance shook his head, tsking Keith. “What should I expect from a guy who wore HALF a jacket, and fingerless gloves and had a mullet. A mullet!” he muttered to himself as he steered them to their bedroom. A stack of paperwork caught Keith’s eye as they passed the nightstand. 

“You didn’t throw out the paperwork from Olkarion?” he asked, his voice hesitant.

“No, I didn’t. Look, I KNOW how you feel about cybernetics, and I get it. I do. Shiro’s galra arm was a trojan horse and things almost went really, really bad. But… this is… what they are proposing, it could change her life. I can’t just refuse that outright. I NEED to read the whole thing. I have to have Pidge and Hunk look it over and debate the pros and cons. I mean, I KNOW that it isn’t an option unless we both agree, and that you aren’t going to agree… but she’s going to be an adult in a few years and if she decides to do it then, I want to understand it and I want to be able to help her make her own choice. So, if you are mad, I’m sorry but I am not going to thr-”

“I’m not mad,” he said, his voice soft. “Actually, when you are done… I think I want to take a look at the information, too.”

“Really?”

“Yeah… She had a clog in her oxygen line and needed help.” Keith sighed, “and I kind of realized that she’d picked an outfit based on hiding surgical scars and access to her ports and keeping her oxygen tank out of sight. She just wants to be seen as normal… I… I remember feeling that way. Wanting people to just see me as the same as anyone else. Not the orphan, or the discipline problem, or ‘that emo kid’, or Shiro’s pet project, or the Galra half-breed.”

Lance stepped back, giving Keith a little space to just… process. “I can understand why that would bug you. I know you had a really rough time with people writing you off before giving you a chance.”

“So… yeah… once you are done with the information, I want to go through it, too. I still do NOT trust cyber stuff… but… the Olkari aren’t Zarkon’s Galra. These are the doctors we’ve trusted for her entire life, right?”

“Yeah, that’s kind of how I see it. We’ve trusted them before and they’ve saved her. It’s just- what they want to do is so new. She’d be the first. I’m not completely sold on the idea, you know that, right?”

“Yeah,” Keith rubbed at his face, “I suck at the medical stuff.”

“Oh, you do not,” Lance leaned in and kissed his cheek, “I have seen you change dressings, unclog tubes, and give injections without flinching, because that’s what your daughter needs, so you just do it. You don’t suck at the medical stuff- you get overwhelmed at the medical gibberish. Completely different thing. Now- sit and let me try to tame this chaos…” He plunked Keith onto the side of the bed and grabbed a little basket of assorted hair… stuff, before eyeing his husband critically. “I don’t even know how you… like… just WHAT is happening with your hair right now?”

“I don’t know. It’s hair. I don’t really think about it. Is it doing something weird?”

One of Lance’s eyebrows shot up to his hair line and he sighed dramatically, “lemme see what I can manage here.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Talia looked beautiful in her emerald dress as she laughed with her friends by the punch bowl. Thace and Juanita hadn’t left the dancefloor the entire night as far as Keith could tell. Rai was happily chatting away with Pidge and Matt- probably debating video game tactics. Keith was having a good time (even if his hair felt weird tied back in something Lance had called an upside down Dutch braid and his dress uniform was stiff)… and Lance… Lance was working his way through champagne at a dangerous pace.

“How about you eat something?” Keith suggested, plucking the champagne flute from his husband’s long fingers.

“Bailey, though?!?!” Lance said instead, although he did grab a breadstick out of the basket Keith proffered, “Bailey goddamn Griffin?!?! Why???”

“I mean, he’s a handsome enough kid,” Keith said with a shrug, glancing over at the tall brunet who was chatting with his daughter. “Tall, nice smile, athletic… most of the girls Talia’s age have been paying him attention. He’s probably popular.”

“But he’s James Griffin’s nephew. James fucking Griffin, Keith! You HATE James Griffin!”

“One- I do not hate James Griffin. I just… don’t particularly LIKE James Griffin. But, Veronica likes him, so he can’t be all that awful, right? And two- Bailey isn’t James. How would you like it if people wrote off Thace, or Rai because they thought Marco was a jackass in high school?”

“Uhhh… I’ll have you know that Marco was very beloved in high school. Everybody liked Marco.”

He chuckled, Lance must be tipsy if he was so vocal in defence of his big brother. Sober, he tended to do a better job of hiding his kid brother hero worship. It was cute, though, so Keith wasn’t going to mention anything. “Alright- what if people judged Rai and Thace by how Yorak acts?”

“Not a fair comparison- your little brother is Galra and is growing up in the Blades of Marmora. He’s not exactly living with the same expectations of behavior… besides, he’s Kolivan’s son- who in their right mind would even THINK something negative about the little hellion.”

“He’s not a hellion,” Keith laughed, “he’s just… a kid. Galra kids are more aggressive, he’ll grow out of it.” ‘It’ being his half brother’s tendency to growl at Lance- which honestly, Keith suspected he did because it made their mother laugh.

“Bailey Griffin,” Lance said again, shaking his head morosely. “Annnnnnd now they are dancing… great. He probably likes her back. That’s unacceptable, Keith! If she starts dating Bailey goddamn Griffin I’ll… No! I’m not even saying it because it can’t happen. It won’t. And that’s that.”

“Does she look winded to you?” Keith asked, worry clenching around his heart like icy thorns.

“She looks beautiful… and no.”

“Are you sure?”

Lance caught his hand, lacing their fingers together. “Stop it. She’s fine. She’s having fun. You checked everything over yourself before we even left our quarters. You are being overprotective and fussy again.”

“I’m not fussing,” he argued, “I’m just… concerned. It’s important that she doesn’t overexert herself.”

“God, you are cute when you go all Dad-mode.”

“Dad-mode? What? I AM a Dad, that’s my standard mode. It’s been my standard mode for eighteen years.”

“No, I mean when you get all protective and worried and stuff. You’re adorable.”

“Adorable?”

“Yeah… adorable. You’re an adorable Dad.” He smiled, “you’re a great Dad, Keith. You really are.”

“High praise, considering the source.” He smiled back at Lance, his worry already starting to drain away.

“Thanks,” Lance said, scooting his chair over so he could curl up against Keith and watch the spectacle that was the annual Gala. “Shiro did a decent job on the speech. Who do you think wrote it?”

“My guess is your sister,” Keith laughed, “and then some jokes added by our daughter. Definitely not Shiro- there wasn’t a single pun in the whole thing.”  
“Mmm true- and there are only two people with the power to keep him away from puns- Roni and Talia, so I think you are probably right- awwww, look at Thace! Dipping Juanita- how sweet!”

“Pretty sure our little boy is in love,” Keith cooed.

“Well, he is eighteen, I was in love with you when I was eighteen.”

“They all seem so much younger than we were, though.”

“They aren’t fighting in a war,” Lance chuckled, “that has a way of making you grow up faster.”

“Thankfully. Thace, Kashi and Yorak are in the first generation of Galra in ten millennia that DIDN’T grow up in the midst of an intergalactic war. That’s amazing. It’s amazing to think that we had a part to play in that.”

“Yeah- look at all these kids, most of them were born after the peace treaties were being signed. Ohhh no! Bailey goddamn Griffin- are you shitting me right now?”

“What- ohhhhhh…” he chuckled as his gaze settled on their daughter and James Griffin’s nephew. “Think that’s her first real kiss?” he asked quietly.

Lance glared, “don’t.” He grabbed his champagne flute and downed the contents in one gulp. “I’m gonna hafta pretend I like James Griffin, aren’t I? You know that kid lives with him, right?”

Keith just watched Lance and tried to figure out where the time had gone. He still felt like that kid that had fought alongside him all those years ago. Was it really twenty years already? He’d spent two entire decades loving the loud-mouthed, competitive kid that had declared them rivals and pushed him into taking risks and being better and chipped away at his walls until Keith had somehow started to trust people. Twenty years learning how to love people by loving Lance. Almost two decades of raising a family together.

“Hey- babe?”

“Yeah?” Lance was still scowling at the dancefloor.

“You are the best father I have EVER seen. Seriously, you were born for being a parent. So… I don’t even need to look over that paperwork. I know you’ll make the right call for Talia. I trust your judgement more than mine on this subject.”

That managed to pry his attention away from the young pair on the dancefloor, “seriously?”  
Keith nodded, “yeah- I know I’m not able to be objective. You are. You handle this, and I’ll… be the one to make nice with James as long as those two are a thing. Delegation, right?”

“It’s the hallmark of a good leader,” Lance replied teasingly. “Making sure each member of the team is doing what they are best at.”

“I love you, Lance,” he leaned over to kiss him softly. Lance’s response was a tad more… enthusiastic, probably courtesy of too much champagne, but Keith wasn’t complaining.

“I love you, too, Keith,” Lance sighed as he pulled back and went back to snuggling into Keith’s chest. “Bailey goddamn Griffin.”

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, you read that right- Krolia and Kolivan have a son. Krolia deserves to be able to raise a child of her own, and I think they are a cute pair. 
> 
> Yes, his name is Yorak. No, Krolia didn't suggest it. Kolivan did because he likes the name and she thought it was too perfect to say no to.
> 
> Yes, Bailey 'goddamn' Griffin MAY show up in future stories.


End file.
